The present invention relates to a buck converter for converting an input voltage into an output voltage. The invention further relates to a corresponding system, a corresponding method and a corresponding design structure.
Buck converters are used as point-of-load voltage converts to supply microprocessors, FPGAs and similar devices with a low voltage at high currents.
The stability of the converted voltage is important for reliable device operation. In particular there are limits for the supply voltage of modern microprocessors which are only very little higher than the recommended operation voltage.
Therefore it is important to guarantee that the buck converter does not exceed these supply voltage limits.
When the load current suddenly changes, the buck converter has to react by regulating its output voltage. In particular, a sudden strong reduction in load current could result in a strong increase of the supply voltage.
Modern microprocessors running at very high frequency can reduce their current consumption very rapidly from full load to nearly no load, for instance by entering a standby mode.
In known buck converter designs the output capacitor is chosen to be large enough to absorb the entire energy stored in the inductor without exceeding the maximum supply voltage of the load device. This results in higher requirements for the output capacitor than the steady-state operation which effects design size.